


Skin Catalogue

by Leamas



Series: Skin Catalogue [1]
Category: A Perfect Spy - John le Carré
Genre: M/M, Scars, take a closer look at Axel's fucked up body
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-08
Updated: 2016-12-08
Packaged: 2018-09-07 08:49:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8791237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leamas/pseuds/Leamas
Summary: The scars that covered Axel's sides didn’t make his skin feel any stronger, although Pym felt they should. Scars were meant to be rough, like leather. Axel’s only felt fragile, like folded paper.





	

1.

Despite the chill Axel’s face was flushed, and his eyes glazed over as he watched Pym from where he sat against the wall. For his part, Pym tried not to make it obvious that he was keeping an eye on Axel. He didn’t need to – Axel was too ill even to stand, never mind move, and if he started retching again, Pym would surely hear him.

When he finished wiping down the bed Pym pulled back the sheets, balling them up and throwing them near the door. He’d wash them tonight, he decided, because Axel certainly wouldn’t be able to, so as Axel’s friend the responsibility fell to him.

“Take off your shirt,” said Pym to Axel. He tried to sound encouraging, and friendly, but his efforts seemed to bypass Axel.

“I’m afraid that I don’t understand.”

Axel sat huddled against the wall, with Pym’s blanket wrapped around his shoulders. Maybe Pym should have taken Axel’s shirt off first, before he could dirty it where he’d been sick, but it was too late for that now. It was lucky that Axel hadn’t been able to keep anything down for a few days now, and had stopped trying.

“Don’t you want me to wash that?” Pym asked, cautiously. “Or would you prefer to sleep in your own vomit?”

Axel glanced down at his shirt like he was only seeing it for the first time, and then looked back up to Pym. “We can’t have your cleaning efforts be in vain.”

“No,” Pym said.

Axel sat forward, letting the blanket fall from his shoulders. He was uneasy on his knees, reaching out to the wall for balance and shivering. His other hand shook as he reached up to the top button on his pyjamas.

Pym didn’t think about what he was doing. He knelt in front of Axel, and pulled his small wrist away from the top of his shirt. His wrist felt even smaller in Pym’s hand than it looked, and despite his sweaty, red face, he was freezing.

“Let me do this,” Pym said, when he caught Axel watching him.

“How intimate of you, Sir Magnus.”

Pym unbuttoned the first button, then the second, just past his collarbone. For someone as ill as Axel was he sat so impossibly rigid, his glassy eyes never waving from Pym’s face as he worked his pyjamas open, down Axel’s chest and then to the bottom. Pym pushed the collar of Axel’s pyjama top back over his shoulders. It didn’t slip past him how Axel sucked in a breath, holding himself as still as a statue.

He couldn’t stop his eyes from moving along Axel’s collarbone to where his arm attached to his shoulder at a harsh, sharp angle. Gingerly, as delicately as he dared, Pym wiped his thumb against the bone. Axel, now having exhausted all his remaining strength sitting up, shuddered.

“Allow me,” Axel said.

Pym watched as Axel pulled his shirt off, not to be deterred by his own shaky hands. Shirtless, Axel seemed even smaller than he did with his jacket wrapped twice around him, with the hollow in the base of his collarbone twitching every time Axel swallowed and his ribs wrapping round his chest like fingers. His skin was pale like paper; Pym could imagine running his fingers down the length of Axel’s back and feeling its dryness under his fingers, and its coldness.

He noticed Axel’s scars, too, not for the first time, although he’d never seen Axel completely shirtless before. There was nothing Pym could quickly identify. He had scratches and blemishes that weren't unlike scars Pym himself had picked up from life, and marks that looked like they were left there by sickness, or infection. There was a cluster of deep, white scars by his left hip, with a few reaching higher up his side.

Axel’s dark eyes were still watching Pym’s face. Pym watched his cracked lips part as he spoke. “Do you like what you see, Sir Magnus?”

Axel held out his shirt, his arm shaking. Pym took the shirt and threw it towards the door, with Axel’s sheets.

“If you’ve seen all there is to see,” Axel said, “I think you should help me find something warm. Do you agree?”

“Yes.” Pym reached around Axel and took the blanket that had been dropped on the floor, pulling it back up and drowning Axel in it.

 

2.

Every morning the barn would grow light again, and every morning Pym would watch Axel’s face soften in the warm glow as the shadows faded, and he would wait for Axel to look past him towards the cracks in the barn door, where he could notice the time as well.

“And this would be my sign to leave.”

Pym watched Axel. He looked tired. It wasn’t the hurried, prickly exhaustion that haunted Axel in their days in Bern, hidden between his distaste for laying in his bed and the erratic typing Pym fell asleep to each night, but a soft, languid tired. Like Pym could lay Axel down and watch as he settled, and then as he slept.

“Stay here,” Pym said. “We’ll sleep in the loft. No one will find us.”

“And your man won’t wonder why you have not returned?”

“No.”

“Ah,” Axel said, but didn’t elaborate, only reaching over the table for the last of his vodka.

Pym caught Axel’s wrist out of the air and pulled his hand closer.

His hand was long, but delicate next to Pym’s. The bones and tendons raised up against his skin as he tensed his fingers then relaxed, letting his fingers loosely curl over themselves. His smallest finger on his right hand bent inward at too harsh an angle. One of his nails was split; another sat shorter than the rest, the top of his nailbed cracked.

Pym wrapped both his hands around Axel’s. He pushed Axel’s sleeve down his wrist, past the bone that was angled as sharply as the rest of Axel. Several thin, faded white lines crossed themselves around his wrists, just where a manacle would lay.

Pym’s chest tightened. He wanted ask who was waiting for Axel – who was expecting him, and what would happen if he never returned home.

Axel spread his fingers and squeezed what part of Pym’s hand he could hold with only one his. When Pym looked up, Axel’s face was closer than he expected.

“You are stalling,” Axel said. “Can you not stand to say goodbye to me, Sir Magnus?”

For a moment he looked so young, his face relaxing. It lasted only for a moment before the creases around his eyes returned, and in the faint light the shadows under his eyes looked like a bruise.

Pym caught all of Axel’s hand in his and pulled it closer to his own chest. “Never.”

 

3.

When Pym eased Axel down onto the hay it was different than what he had thought it would be. Pym never expected Axel to be heavy, but it still came as a surprise how light he was, and how easy it was to wrap his arms around Axel’s chest and lower him to the ground, on his back.

Axel shivered when Pym unbuttoned his coat and let it rest behind him. “People will ask why I have straw on my coat and in my hair. What should I tell them?”

Pym leaned over Axel, one knee beside Axel’s hip. One hand fell onto Axel’s shoulder, and then carefully, moved to his chest and then to the hem of his shirt, tugging slightly at it. “Tell them you were with a beautiful woman. That she couldn’t wait, and she needed to have you now.”

With only the light Pym brought it was hard to make out where Axel was, but Pym knew every hollow of his face, every harsh line on his jaw and every grey hair on his head. Pym knew them even as his shadow covered Axel, and even as the shadows on Axel’s face left his eyes looking hollow like a corpse, and his smile less sincere than it really was.

He was looking up at Pym, laughing.

“I will tell them I was with a whore,” Axel said.

“Would they believe you'd be with a whore in a barn?” Pym asked.

“Why wouldn’t I be with a whore in a barn?”

He grabbed Pym’s hand and pushed it under his shirt, skin against skin. He shivered against Pym at once, jerking away from where Pym’s hands crawled up his sides.

The scars that covered Axel's didn’t make his skin feel any stronger, although Pym felt they should. Scars were meant to be rough, like leather. Axel’s only felt fragile, like folded paper.

He followed the curve of Axel’s side up to his ribs. For a long time Axel lay still and watched Pym count every one, measuring the bumps where his ribcage should have been smooth. His fingers found the smooth circles under his arm that were once burns, and the raised lines across his stomach where Axel had been beaten open. If Axel had anything in him but his bones he would have leaked out through the wounds, Pym was certain, but he was only bones and skin.

Pym’s hands moved down to Axel’s back, to his shoulders. His knee found its way between Axel’s legs. They were close enough for their chests to touch.

Axel looped one of his own arms around Pym’s shoulder, burying his hand in Pym’s hair.

“Your hands are so cold. Have you ever been warm once?”

“I don’t think so,” Pym said.

Kissing Axel was soft, like kissing air. There was no pressure, no force, where their lips met. Pym forgot he was holding himself over Axel, forgot how cold it was at night, forgot his wandering hands. When Axel’s arm slipped down from his shoulder, and he held to the elbow of Pym’s jacket, Pym finally moved away. Both hands found a free space on Axel’s skin to make up for the separation.

 

4.

They walked arm-in-arm, so close against each other than Axel’s dead leg became Pym’s dead leg, and Pym’s body became Axel’s, to go with the rest of him. Every time they met they found themselves walking, through cities and parks, alone together in the dark or down a crowded street in broad daylight. Some days it reminded Pym of Bern, and he marvelled at how the drive for secrecy he felt then had dimmed. Funny – what they were doing in America was so much worse than the crime for which Axel was wanted in Bern.

“Every time we meet I spend hours waiting,” Axel said. “I know everything that you will do, and I know that it will mean something. All of this, so no one can see us, but then I see you…”

His words trailed off. He hung heavier on Pym’s arm as they walked, if anything about Axel could count as being heavy. Pym thought about what it would be like to walk with his arm around Axel’s waist. He would be able to hold him better, and take more of the weight of Axel’s pained body from his leg.

“If someone saw us,” Axel started again, “even if only an accident, people would want to know, ‘Who is that man walking with Sir Magnus? Why does he have him?’”

“And I would tell them it is only me.”

“And when they ask about me?”

Pym stopped, and Axel stopped with him. Their eyes met. If they weren’t in public, Pym might have wanted to kiss Axel. As things stood, the wanting was enough. Knowing that Axel wanted the same was enough.

“Aren’t you part of me, Poppy?” Pym said. “Just like I am your legs and you are –”

Axel laughed, and shook his head. Pym felt Axel’s hand squeeze tighter around his arm. “I do not think it works that way.”


End file.
